A Look At All The Democratic Candidates For President

The first round of Democratic primary debates are this week, and that means it’s time to take a first look at all the candidates in the race!

Beto O’Rourke: The upstart Texan’s campaign has been an eye-opening experience, as he travels the country learning the difference between “actually likable” and “likable when compared to Ted Cruz”

Cory Booker: Brilliant, eloquent, and an outspoken voice on issues of racial justice, Booker is the clear frontrunner in the alternate universe where Hillary Clinton picks him as her running mate instead of Tim Kaine in 2016, wins the election, and is forced not to run for reelection due to her ailing health

Kirsten Gillibrand: If elections were won on style alone, her killer black-and-pink website would already have her installed as President-for-Life

Elizabeth Warren: Warren’s combination of smart, thoroughly-researched policy and fiery oratory makes her a leading candidate to be taken down either by the public’s shallow gravitation to some handsome, substance-free white guy like Beto in the primary or the media inevitably treating her claiming Native American ancestry as exactly on par with Donald Trump’s decades of rape, fraud, racism, and stupidity

Jay Inslee: The Washington governor is the only person in the primary race who’s making climate change the focus of his campaign, which, uh, is kind of worrisome. Like, climate change is a real and incredibly serious issue that will cause widespread devastation if we don’t take immediate, focused action. Sea level rises will put tens of millions of Americans underwater, you know

Richard Ojeda: The former Army major dropped out all the way back in January, the most hilariously pathetic display in a national campaign since Jim Gilmore got 12 votes in the 2016 Iowa caucuses

Kamala Harris: I’m having a weird time trying to come up with a joke for her, since she appears to be running on the standard Democratic platform that came in the box without even trying to personalize it

Mike Gravel: Bless this man, bless the leftist teens running his campaign, but most of all, bless his fantastic Twitter avatar

Seth Moulton: This is a white man with a middle-of-the-road platform who, sizing up a field full of white men campaigning on middle-of-the-road platforms, several of whom enjoy actual name recognition and even nationwide fame, thought “yes. this is my time. I offer something nobody else in this race does, and because of that, I will soon be the President of the United States”

Michael Bennet: This is a white man with a middle-of-the-road platform who, sizing up a field full of white men campaigning on middle-of-the-road platforms, also thought the above, except he did so after Joe Biden formally declared his candidacy

Steve Bullock: This is a white man with a middle-of-the-road platform who, sizing up a field full of white men campaigning on middle-of-the-road platforms, thought the same thing as those guys above, except he joined the race after Michael Bennet did

Tim Ryan: The American people are looking for a strong and upstanding president, a president of unshakeable courage and deep conviction, which is why they’re bound to gravitate to the Ohio Congressman, a man who constantly looks like he’s being held at gunpoint

Wayne Messam: The mayor of Miramar, Florida really shook up the race with his late entry, convincing me to wait until just before the debates to publish the most comprehensive list of candidates I could

Eric Swalwell: One of the most inspiring stories in the race, Swalwell aims to prove that you can still be president even if your face perpetually looks weirdly swollen, like your body holds ten more pounds of fluid than it should

Pete Buttigieg: The first openly gay candidate to run for the Democratic nomination, one of only two people in the race under age 40, an intellectually insatiable polyglot, and a Navy lieutenant, Mayor Pete offers pretty much the starkest contrast with Donald Trump he possibly could as an Ivy League-educated white man, but Cory Booker’s presence in the race will make it hard for him to consolidate the crucial Rhodes Scholar vote

Bill de Blasio: It’s a shame that the New York mayor is so despised in his own city, because, at 6-foot-5, he is the tallest candidate in the race and, given how often the taller candidate wins the presidency, our greatest hope against the 6-foot-3 Donald Trump

Joe Sestak: Jesus Christ WHY

Bernie Sanders: Look, he can’t help it, but it’s kind of a shame that the Vermont senator, the person with the most progressive, forward-thinking agenda in the running, is a phlegmy 77-year-old white guy

Tulsi Gabbard: Like, why couldn’t she be the face of the burgeoning democratic socialist movement—a representative of the emerging multiracial America, and a member of the generation that will inherit this country, the starkest possible contrast to Trump and the shambling half-corpses that run the American right in both image and ideology—instead of “somehow one of the more conservative people in the race and literally a sympathizer of Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad”?

sorry no jokes here i’m just a bit bummed about it is all

Marianne Williamson: This long-shot candidate supports a raft of admirably progressive legislation, including, notably, explicitly calling for hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations for slavery, but oooh she’s one of those New-Age types who unironically says things like “forge a new, whole-person, heart-centered political dynamic” haha yeah right like anyone’s gonna take her seriously

Amy Klobuchar: I had a pretty decent joke for her back when her campaign website didn’t have any policy details about how she’d scared away all the staffers who write such things, but I put this off for so long that it’s no longer timely

Andrew Yang: This long-shot candidate is centering his campaign around the potentially revolutionary idea of universal basic income, backing it up with the most far-reaching yet granular set of policy proposals of anybody in the race, and has already built the sort of meme-tastic, demography-spanning Internet following that helped propel Bernie Sanders to prominence in 2016, which is why it’s such a shame that he’s such a huge giganto dork: